Aug 18 China's state council has approved a 200 billion yuan ($30.19 billion) venture capital fund to invest in innovative technology and industrial upgrading projects, the country's state assets regulator said on Thursday.

China has been encouraging its industrial firms to rise up the value chain through technical innovation and tougher efficiency standards, with the aim of creating globally competitive conglomerates. It has vowed to be more selective in the way it disburses funds, and aims to cut off credit for non-competitive firms that are unable to upgrade.

After what will have been eight years of debate over executive overreach and Barack Obama’s “pen and phone,” and  it will be time for “liberty’s meataxe” when it comes to government programs.

Regulatory liberalization, when it ever happened, has been bipartisan and popular. There was transportation and financial liberalization in the late 70s and 80s, and unfunded mandate relief in the 1990s.

Kim Conner sees more than bricks and steel rising at High and Vine streets in Millville.

She also sees hope that the future Cumberland County College’s Arts and Business Innovation Center, and the estimated 500 students it will bring to High Street each semester, could help revive the downtown arts district that took a downturn along with the rest of the national economy.

The Orange County Board of Supervisors has unanimously adopted an Economic Development Incentive Policy it hopes will induce commercial investment in the community and promote the county’s efforts to be business-friendly.

To complement and further enhance the opportunity of investment in Orange County, the Orange County Economic Development Authority (EDA) approved 11 performance-based incentives to offer entrepreneurs, existing businesses or businesses locating operations in Orange County. The board of supervisors unanimously voted to adopt the policy earlier this summer.

Ten groups culled from 180 nominees won Wisconsin Innovation Awards at a ceremony in Madison this week.

Winners were chosen by a panel of 17 industry experts from around the state, organizers said.

"These awards highlight companies innovating in the high-tech realm like Understory, which recently raised $7.5 million of funding, to meaningful innovations in overlooked areas like SnotTape," said Troy Vosseller, a gener8tor co-founder who attended the event.

Image: http://www.jsonline.com

Joe Biden's cancer moonshot might not be as far-fetched as you think.

Why? Because multiple U.S. agencies recently took steps to make the cancer moonshot a reality by further strengthening patent rights.

Earlier this summer, the Patent and Trademark Office created an expedited review process for certain patent applications covering "immunotherapies" — new cancer treatments that re-engineer the body's immune system to attack tumors. 

Image: http://www.ibtimes.com

Whether you're an experienced job hunter or just striking out on your first round of interviews, you're probably pretty focused on sussing out a prospective employer's culture to see if you'd fit in. So heeding expert advice, we pay attention to interviewers’ personalities and picture ourselves sitting at a happy hour with our potential coworkers. We ask ourselves if that feels comfortable, what kind of personality a company seems to have, and whether ours squares with it.

1. Does humanity have a future beyond Earth?

“I think it’s a dangerous delusion to envisage mass emigration from Earth. There’s nowhere else in the solar system that’s as comfortable as even the top of Everest or the South Pole. We must address the world’s problems here. Nevertheless, I’d guess that by the next century, there will be groups of privately funded adventurers living on Mars and thereafter perhaps elsewhere in the solar system. We should surely wish these pioneer settlers good luck in using all the cyborg techniques and biotech to adapt to alien environments. Within a few centuries they will have become a new species: the posthuman era will have begun. Travel beyond the solar system is an enterprise for posthumans—organic or inorganic.” —Martin Rees, British cosmologist and astrophysicist

The Mayor’s Office of Economic Development issued more than $5.07 million dollars in grant funds to 48 local organizations during the first half of 2016.

Grantees were selected based on their economic impact within Maui County through business and/or jobs created or sustained. Improvements to Maui County in the areas of environment, agriculture, business, sports, arts, and cultural were also considered.

Image: http://mauinow.com

The U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Science and Technology Directorate, recently unveiled a list of 13 small businesses working towards “the development of new cyber security technology.” The companies are part of the 2016 Small Business Innovation Research program.  Each was awarded approximately $100,000 in funding, for a total of $1.3 million, and four are using blockchains in their product.

The Department of Homeland Security was formed in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, as part of a determined national effort to safeguard the United States against terrorism. The Department became the third-largest federal department, bringing together 22 different federal agencies, each with a role in this effort.

From pristine beaches in Indonesia to picturesque mountains in Armenia, more freelancers and entrepreneurs are escaping fluorescent-lit cubicle life for less traditional "offices" overseas. I've met them—and I am one myself.

You don't need to be 22 and living off a trust fund to make this happen, either. Actually, it's the opposite: Money considerations are a key reason for ditching North America. For me, living and working abroad was the right financial decision to build and grow my marketing agency.

The chief innovation officer (sometimes abbreviated as CINO) is the business world’s response to a fast-moving, technology-fueled marketplace. The evolution of technology has shortened the timeline on new product releases, hastened the pace at which customers expect to receive feedback and service, and created a more competitive world where today’s practices may not be good enough tomorrow. CINOs show organizations how to keep pace by integrating new ideas into an organization’s existing processes and infrastructure, most often through the use of modern technology.

Image: Richard Culatta, chief innovation officer of Rhode Island - DAVID KIDD

In 1985 Peter Drucker argued for a shift toward an entrepreneurial society, one where “executives in all institutions…make innovation and entrepreneurship a normal, ongoing everyday activity.” This intentionally broad view requires a fundamental change in mindset. Drucker was pushing us to think and act less like employees taking orders and more like free agents, alert and responsive to opportunities whether we work in a startup or in a large corporation.

Millennials don’t have a reputation as a hard-working generation. The caricature of the Millennial worker is more or less a cartoon of an entitled recipient of hundreds of plastic participation trophies who cares less about paying his dues at work and more about perks like flex-time, beer carts, and nap rooms. Or perhaps I should say that “we” have that reputation, since I’m technically a Millennial — most demographers put the start-date for this generation at 1981.

When thinking about how much seed capital to raise, we need a more sophisticated lens than just the old rule of thumb of “18 months of runway.” This is especially crucial given that the 18-month timeframe is a bit circular — a founder can always just take whatever amount she closes and divide by 18 to determine what her monthly burn rate should be. The true question, however, is if that level of spending will result in enough progress to successfully raise that next round of (hopefully) Series A capital.

As a vital engine of California’s economy, UC Berkeley has been generating startups at an ever-faster rate in recent years and stimulating more and more companies and jobs, according to a study released today by the Bay Area Council Economic Institute.

Counting back to 1968, the campus has spawned 260 startups, 99 of which were still active as of June 2015, the study showed. About half of the active startups are in the information technology field. The report details the many ways that the campus supports entrepreneurial efforts.

Image: Caroline Winnett, executive director of Berkeley’s SkyDeck startup accelerator - https://news.berkeley.edu

When universities invent, those inventions should benefit everyone. Unfortunately, they sometimes end up in the hands of patent trolls—companies that serve no purpose but to amass patents and demand money from others. When a university sells patents to trolls, it undermines the university’s purpose as a driver of innovation. Those patents become landmines that make innovation more difficult.

Image: https://www.eff.org

The only thing certain about the global economy is uncertainty. Thanks to political unrest, terrorist attacks, and the repercussions of Brexit, caution is the dominant mindset of investors in every market, according to the latest quarterly global report on venture capital trends published jointly by KPMG International and CB Insights.

Image: Flickr user Mark Kelly

China is adding new instruments to its economic dashboard that will incorporate big data to help better track innovation and entrepreneurship in the new economy. Three indicators tracking innovation, entrepreneurship and the new economy are rolling out this year to gauge output in those fast-moving, category-bending and hard-to-measure sectors. All three will be distilled partly from massive hauls of big data from the internet.

The critical success factors for a product business are well known, starting with selling every unit with a gross margin of 50 percent or more, building a patent and other intellectual property, and continuous product improvement. If your forte is a service, like consulting or web site design, it’s harder to find guidance on what will get you funded, and how you can scale your business.

On the product side, once you have a proven product and business model, all you need is money to build inventory, and a sales and marketing operation to drive the business. With services, scaling the business often implies cloning yourself, since you are the intellectual property and the competitive advantage. You have no shelf life, so you can’t make money while you sleep.